I am a software entrepreneur who is currently an investor and board member in three startup companies. I have a B.S. in mechanical engineering. I was born in 1948. This chapter of my life is about trying to help people make their dreams come true. I started writing about economics because I hate the way that our dysfunctional economy is crushing the dreams of so many people. Young people are delaying getting married and having children because of unstable jobs and incomes. It doesn't have to be this way, and I want to contribute to solving the problem. I believe that prosperity is possible.

The Real Marriage Crisis Is Economics, Not Gay Marriage

Same-sex marriage first surfaced as an issue about 30 years ago. It became a contentious political issue about 20 years ago. Now, the question appears to be moving swiftly to a resolution. Having struggled with the issue of gay marriage in legislatures, voting booths, and courtrooms for many years, the electorate is coming to agree with my father.

Perhaps I should explain. My father was born in 1913. He completed only one year of high school. He married my mother in 1944 and was still married to her when he died in 1994. His advice to everyone was, “Get married. Why should you be happy?”

Years later, my father’s view was echoed by a cartoonist at The New Yorker, who assigned the following lines to one middle-aged woman talking to another: “Gays getting married? Haven’t those people suffered enough?”

For better or worse, the American people seem to be deciding that if gay people want marriage, they are welcome to it.

Before liberals go off the deep end with triumphalism over having vanquished the Dark Forces of Evil in the area of what they like to call “marriage equality,” they should consider one of my maternal grandmother’s favorite injunctions: “Get off your high horse.”

No one can know what impact gay marriage is going to have long term. Forty years ago, progressives were sure that court-ordered busing of school children to achieve racial integration represented a great victory over bigotry and oppression. As events actually played out, however, forced busing was a disaster for everyone concerned.

The most passionate advocates of progressive causes are rarely the people that end up suffering the consequences of liberals’ many bad ideas. President Obama favors teachers’ unions and opposes school vouchers, but he sends his own kids to the Sidwell Friends, a private school. Liberals living in the safety of the Upper West Side of Manhattan demand that the NYPD stop employing the “stop and frisk” tactics that have brought a measure of security to poor neighborhoods in the Bronx.

All this having been said, it seems unlikely that gay marriage will have much societal impact one way or the other. It is hard to come by accurate numbers, but it appears that only perhaps 3% of men and 1.5% of women are “gay enough” to be interested in same-sex marriage. Accordingly conservatives that want to worry about marriage should be worrying about the state of straight (heterosexual) marriage.

It is simply a fact that children do best when their biological parents are married to each other and raise them in an intact family. While other family structures can work in individual cases, statistically they don’t work nearly as well as the traditional nuclear family.

Unfortunately, conventional marriage is in deep trouble. Charles Murray did a good job of describing the problem in his 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 – 2010. In his book, Murray noted that, over a 50-year period, the institution of marriage had basically collapsed within what he calls “the white working class,” which he defines as the bottom 30% of the white population in terms of income.

In 1960, 72% of American adults were married. In the vastly richer 2011 America, only 51% were.

The divorce rate began soaring around 1970. When I went to grade school in a working class neighborhood in the 1950s, there was one kid in our class of 40 whose parents were divorced. Today, 35% of American children are being raised in single-parent families.

In 1960, which was before oral contraceptives, the “morning after pill,” and legalized abortion, less than 5% of babies were born to unmarried mothers. In 2010 the percentage of out-of-wedlock births was 41%. More than half of all of today’s U.S. infants are born into welfare via the WIC program. Medicaid subsidized 41% of all babies born in 2011.

Human nature doesn’t change. So, what did change, starting around 1960, to account for the decline in marriage rates, the sharp increase in divorce, and the explosion of out-of-wedlock births? Basically, what happened was a collision between a falling sex ratio (the number of adult males per 100 adult females), economic stagnation, and a burgeoning progressive welfare state.

Basically, marriage is a market, like steel scrap or copper. Small changes in the supply/demand balance can produce huge swings in prices. Between 1950 and 1970, the “price” of women’s sexual favors collapsed, while revisions in welfare rules made it possible for low-income women to effectively “marry the government.” At the same time, changes in the economy made it more and more practical for educated single women to support themselves and their children without the help of a man.

Western civilization as we know it evolved during a time when women were in relatively short supply, due mainly to death in childbirth. From 1790 to 1910, the sex ratio in the U.S. hovered around 104 (adult males per 100 adult females).

Around 1910, medical science began to get a handle on death in childbirth, and the sex ratio began falling. It hit 100 in 1945 and bottomed out at about 95 in 1970. Not coincidentally, this was when the divorce rate (and hemlines) began soaring.

When women were scarce, they were able to command a high price in the dating/mating market. In 1910, a woman could demand that a man be economically successful, marry her, and be faithful to her because, on the margin, she could replace him, but he couldn’t replace her. There were more men seeking sex than there were women available to supply it.

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